not sure if this is the best spot for this, but as someone who’s been interested in the surreal and depressing intersection of creativity, morality, and intellectual property law, this post challenged some of my long held assumptions about sampling, remix culture, etc.
(my assumptions: music IP court cases have molded “intellectual property” law to more closely resemble the colloquial definition of property, land: there is a finite amount of it, almost none of it is open to the public, and trespassers will be prosecuted. both the early anti-sampling verdicts against rap producers in the 90s, and the recent suits brought against robin thicke, katy perry, ed sheeran, etc, are basically just rent-seeking. intellectual property is theft)
if anyone doesn’t know how tiktok works: in addition to tracking user behavior (watch time, likes) and submitted metadata (hashtags), it does analysis on the actual videos themselves. the company claimed that it uses “natural language processing” and “computer vision technology”, presumably trying to distinguish humans from frogs, music from dialog, etc.
this is absolutely terrifying, but it works so well that, unlike previous apps, you don’t need to subscribe to content, or have subscribers in order for your content to be seen. the algorithm shows your post to people in your micro bubble, if they like it, it goes to a larger bubble, if they like it, it goes to a larger bubble, etc.
consequently, anyone can take a sound or video, recontextualize and repost it in any way they see fit, and potentially get traction. remix culture thrives on tiktok in complete defiance to the way things have been working in the “real world” of copyright law offline. i am not a big fan of the app (sensory overload), but this specific aspect has always been pretty inspiring to me. turns out it’s not without tradeoffs.
the writing in this article is so harsh that it almost feels petty at times (it’s pitchfork), but the problem it identifies at the end is something i will be thinking about:
Looking back, it’s funny to remember the intense utopianism surrounding the internet’s potential for the endless exchange and reinterpretation of music. Through cover versions, sampling, and mashups, you could create your own takes of popular songs, dissolving musical hierarchies and traditional producer-consumer relationships. In 2004, the ingenuity of Danger Mouse’s Grey Album—which cross-pollinated JAY-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album, prompting a cease and desist from EMI—even raised questions about whether the capitalist recording industry had been “rendered superfluous” by more democratically-inclined bedroom producers. But these hopes have long been deflated and replaced with an annoyed wariness. As a VICE writer argued in 2016, “We live in a world where every popular musical creation is now at risk of being swiftly spliced, twisted and mashed up like a potato for RTs by a bored kid in the Netherlands with an Ableton crack.”
What’s annoying about Tiagz is how he vacuums up viral sounds with little consideration of their meaning or intention, seeing them as another blank canvas on which to blindly impose his brand. The popularity of his tepid trap beats only confirms the suspicion that the biggest money makers on TikTok will dance to anything. Tiagz’s remixing is not an emblem of creativity, but standardization; all audio is subsumed under the same utilitarian goal. Perhaps on TikTok, where genre means little to nothing, remixes in general lose potency: Producers usually pull from a limited, pre-selected pool of samples, and each trending audio can come with several versions—a slow + reverb remix, a lo-fi one, a mash-up with another popular song—so that it’s flogged until its eventual death. What you start to feel, essentially, is the smothering of spontaneity, the need to extract more and more attention out of ephemeral fun. When everyone has access to everything, perhaps closed creative borders become more appealing.
